Baseball Standings Flaw in "WC" Column

In Major League Baseball, the post-season playoffs to determine the championship involves eight teams: the three divisional winners from each league along with the second-place team from each league with the best regular season win-loss record (designated as the wild card team). In the American League (from this morning's paper), Boston is leading the East at 61-37, Detroit is leading the Central at 53-47, and Texas is leading the West at 58-43. The best second-place team so far is the East's New York Yankees, with a 58-40 mark. For the sake of this article, I'll leave out the National League except to say that "my" Atlanta Braves would be a wild card team were the season to end today...

In the newspaper sports section standings, they have traditionally listed how many "games behind" each team is from the divisional leader, in the column designated "GB". For example, at 58-40, the Yanks are three games behind Boston's 61-37. But lately they've added a new column next to "GB": "WC", or "wild card". This tells how many games behind the current wild leader a team is in the regular season so far. So for example, Central's second place team Cleveland, at 51-47, is seven games behind New York for the wild card spot. This is interesting in that they are only one game behind Detroit for first place in their own division! Now, this is all well and fine until the printed standings show how far behind divisional-leader Detroit is in the wild card race: zero games!

Wait a minute, in strict terms of their regular season records, Central's Detroit, at 53-47, is six games behind East's New York's 58-40. Just because the Tigers happen to be leading their division RIGHT NOW doesn't alter this fact. Detroit could lose their next two games and suddenly find themselves in second place. And then the paper would list THEM as being substantially behind in the wild card race and new leader Cleveland as being zero games behind.

The point to all this is that those devising this "WC" column in the baseball standings would be better informing their readers were they to list how many (if any) games behind the current wild card team each divisional leader was, instead of showing a "-" indicating "zero games behind". For some divisions are simply stronger than others, and in those weak divisions the races can be tight with no room in the playoffs for finishing second. A reader would want to know how far out of the wild card race their team would be were they to slip out of their weak division's lead.

Of course, with me this is all beside the point: I don't need the WC column any more than I do the GB column: just looking at the teams' win-loss records tells me all I want to know. But some folks, I understand, aren't all that quick with numbers...